Corporate Rehabilitation Service

Industry: Energy

Date: From 2012

Employment

Solutions of the macro-sustainability challenges

Improve the inclusive employment of disadvantaged people according to their share of the population, especially that of young people and minorities through the whole value chain

Further targets:

What´s the solution?

E.ON Hungary’s Corporate Rehabilitation Service is a part of our Integration Strategy. The objective of the program is to maintain workforce with changed work capacity (disabled workers or workers who suffered some kind of health damage and gone on a permanent sick leave) by offering them a rehabilitation service. This occupational rehabilitation service is ensured by the HR department’s occupational rehabilitation expert. As part of the service, we provide advisory service for maintaining efficiency of workers with changed work capacity on the workplace, and we provide support for employees returning from a sick leave. Both activities aim to retain the workforce and post, which is beneficial both for the employer and employees.

Business connection

In order to consciously and professionally handle the changing work capacities, we have created our Integration Strategy in 2012, which was adopted and introduced by the Board of E.ON.

The Integration Strategy concerns all workers with special needs even if they don’t have a medical certificate about their status. The strategy covers recruitment, selection and keeping of employees, moreover it supports progression and prevention.

After introducing the Strategy, we have started to pay particular attention on the integration of workers with changed work capacity from 2012. Our primarily focus was not to redeem rehabilitation contributions or to hiring special workers with changed work capacity, however the expected effects of the rising of the retirement age and the cancellation of early retirement affected 1300 mechanics and physical workers intensified the existing commitments for solidarity within the company.

Our electric and gas network requires special knowledge and experience, therefore it takes long time for our mechanics to develop their skills and become experienced staff members. This is why rehabilitation and other health care supports are important for everyone, though specially for the colleagues, who usually spent decades with working for E.ON, and health problems or aging might hamper them from fulfilling their duties.

Results

The Rehabilitation Service Program is a unique corporate responsibility model considering the fact that rehabilitation service is a lack in Hungary, so the chance finding a job of workers suffering from health problems, aging or an accident would extremely decrease. Their knowledge, skills and experience could be used at best in their original activities.

Undertaking occupational rehabilitation of disadvantaged employees, we evince strong solidarity with effort to maintain employee loyalty. The result of the Program is that employees can keep their jobs, so they do not need to apply for state-financed invalidity benefit, and they are not considered disabled workers by law.

More benefit is, that by continuously employed colleagues costs of replacing, training and developing new labour force are avoidable.

In the last 5 years we have accomplished 61 personal rehabilitation programs that resulted in 39 colleagues’ further employment. The number of the employees with changed working capacity at E.ON is 83.